China not squeamish about IQ

After being identified early as a science prodigy, Zhao raced through China’s special programs for gifted students and won a spot in Renmin, one of the country’s most elite high schools. Then, to the shock of his friends and family, he decided to drop out when he was 17. Now, at 21, he oversees his own research project at BGI Shenzhen—the country’s top biotech institute and home to the world’s most powerful cluster of DNA-sequencing machines—where he commands a multimillion-dollar research budget.

Zhao’s goal is to use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world. He and his collaborators, a transnational group of intelligence researchers, fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college.

Some people are smarter than others. It seems like a straightforward truth, and one that should lend itself to scientific investigation. But those who try to study intelligence, at least in the West, find themselves lost in a political minefield. To be sure, not all intelligence research is controversial: If you study cognitive development in toddlers, or the mental decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease, “that’s treated as just normal science,” says Douglas Detterman, founding editor of Intelligence, a leading journal in the field. The trouble starts whenever the heritability of intelligence is discussed, or when intelligence is compared between genders, socioeconomic classes, or—most explosively—racial groupings.

Since the 1990s, when a book called The Bell Curve (coauthored by a psychologist and a political scientist) waded into this last morass, attempts to quantify or even study intelligence have become deeply unfashionable. Dozens of popular books by nonexperts have filled the void, many claiming that IQ—which after more than a century remains the dominant metric for intelligence—predicts nothing important or that intelligence is simply too complex and subtle to be measured.

For the most part, an IQ test—the most common of which today is called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—is a series of brainteasers. You fit abstract shapes together, translate codes using a key, sort numbers or letters into ascending order in your mind. It’s a weirdly playful exercise, the sort of test you would expect to have no bearing on anything else. But studies make it clear that IQ is strongly correlated with the ability to solve all sorts of abstract problems, whether they involve language, math, or visual patterns. The frightening upshot is that IQ remains by far the most powerful predictor of the life outcomes that people care most about in the modern world. Tell me your IQ and I can make a decently accurate prediction of your occupational attainment, how many kids you’ll have, your chances of being arrested for a crime, even how long you’ll live.

Critics claim that these correlations are misleading, that those life outcomes have more to do with culture and environmental circumstances than with innate intellectual ability. And even IQ researchers are far from in agreement about whether scores can be validly compared between groups of people—men and women, blacks and whites—who experience very different environments even within the same country. Variations within groups are often greater than the variations between them, making it impossible to draw conclusions about someone based on their group.

But on an individual level, the evidence points toward a strong genetic component in IQ. Based on studies of twins, siblings, and adoption, contemporary estimates put the heritability of IQ at 50 to 80 percent, and recent studies that measure the genetic similarity of unrelated people seem to have pushed the estimate to the high end of that range.

This is an idea that makes us incredibly uncomfortable. “People don’t like to talk about IQ, because it undermines their notion of equality,” Detterman says. “We think every person is equal to every other, and we like to take credit for our own accomplishments. You are where you are because you worked hard.” The very idea of the American dream is undermined by the notion that some people might be born more likely to succeed. Even if we accept that intelligence is heritable, any effort to improve or even understand the inheritance process strikes us as distasteful, even ghoulish, suggesting the rise of designer superbabies. And given the fallout that sometimes results when academics talk about intelligence as a quantifiable concept—such as the case of Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who in 2006 resigned after suggesting that science is male-dominated due not to discrimination but to a shortage of high-IQ women—it’s no surprise that IQ research is not a popular subject these days at Western universities.

But in his lab at BGI, 21-year-old Zhao has no such squeamishness. He waves it away as “irrational,” making a comparison with height: “Some people are tall and some are short,” he says. Three years into the project, a team of four geneticists is crunching an initial batch of 2,000 DNA samples from high-IQ subjects, searching for where their genomes differ from the norm. Soon Zhao plans to get thousands more through Renmin—his former high school—as well as from other sources around the world. He believes that intelligence has a genetic recipe and that given enough samples—and enough time—his team will find it.

Ask Zhao what draws him to IQ as a research subject and invariably he talks about the mysteries of the brain. He’s driven by a fascination with kids who are born smart; he wants to know what makes them—and by extension, himself—the way they are. But there’s also a basic pragmatism at work. By way of explanation, he points to the International Mathematical Olympiad, a tough competition that has helped define China’s approach to math. Two-thirds of students train for it, he says, and its judgment of the talent is so respected that for years high scorers were allowed to skip gaokao, the traditional college entrance exam. But only a tiny fraction of people have the mathematical gifts to be competitive, Zhao says, and this basically comes down to IQ. “You cannot ask a kid with low IQ to just work hard and then become a really talented mathematician,” he says. “It’s impossible.” And yet, Zhao says, that’s what is currently expected in China. He wants to stop the vast majority of Chinese students from wasting their time.

Three years after arriving at BGI, Zhao’s messy mop of hair is gone, replaced by a dark shadow across his shaved scalp. His project, meanwhile, has grown up along with him. Just a week before my visit, thousands of DNA samples arrived at the institute, each containing the genome of a person with extraordinarily high IQ. They were collected from volunteers around the world by Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at King’s College London who is now one of the project’s main collaborators. Once these samples are processed, BGI’s battery of DNA sequencers will decode them.

SOURCE

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Corruption:  Costco backs Obama, Obama touts Costco

If you’re a millionaire corporate bigwig using your wealth to influence elections, and using your company’s clout to influence legislation, President Obama might give you a tongue-lashing.

Unless you’re a fundraiser and donor for the Obama Victory Fund, and your company’s lobbying agenda coincides with the White House’s — then Obama will give you a shout-out in a major economic address.

In his nationally televised speech Wednesday, Obama sang the praises of retail giant Costco, whose founder Jim Sinegal gave Obama the maximum contribution in two elections and hosted fundraisers for his reelection. Costco has also lobbied for many of Obama’s legislative priorities, including higher minimum wage, Obamacare, and price controls on financial processing fees.

Given the company’s politics and tendency to seek profit through big government, Costco stands out as a model of Obamanomics. The money trail and the free advertising also give off a whiff of cronyism.

Sinegal contributed the maximum $35,800 to the Obama Victory Fund last year and also held a $35,800-a-plate fundraiser for Obama. In the 2008 election, Sinegal gave $43,500 to the DNC (here and here), which is, in effect, a contribution to Obama. On top of that, the Costco founder gave the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign. So that’s more than $80,000 personally to Obama. Add in $100,000 to Obama’s SuperPAC, Priorities USA, plus the $2 million the July 2012 fundraiser reportedly brought Obama, and you’ve got a healthy amount of support.

Obama’s gotten even more, though, from Sinegal and his company.

Sinegal lobbied for Obamacare in 2009. His company has supported a higher minimum wage. Both of these regulations impose proportionally greater costs on the company’s smaller competitors — and almost every competitor is smaller, because Costco is the nation’s No. 2 retailer behind only Wal-Mart. Sinegal also spoke in Obama’s favor at the 2012 convention.

Costco’s founder did all these favors for Obama over five years, and on Wednesday, Obama returned the favor:

"We’ll need our businesses, the best in the world, to pressure Congress to invest in our future, and set an example by providing decent wages and salaries to their own employees.  And I’ll highlight the ones that do just that – companies like Costco, which pays good wages and offers good benefits; or the Container Store, which prides itself on training its workers and on employee satisfaction – because these companies prove that this isn’t just good for their business, it’s good for America."

To recap: Raise $2 million for him, give his campaigns $180,000, lobby for his legislation, and the President will advertise for your store.

SOURCE

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Zimmerman Backlash Continues Thanks to Media Misinformation

More than a week after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin, the backlash against the verdict continues. President Obama spoke some undeniable truths when he noted that the African-American community’s intense reaction to the case must be seen in the context of a long, terrible history of racism. But there is another context too: that of an ideology-based, media-driven false narrative that has distorted a tragedy into a racist outrage.

This narrative has transformed Zimmerman, a man of racially mixed heritage that included white, Hispanic and black roots (a grandmother who helped raise him had an Afro-Peruvian father), into an honorary white male steeped in white privilege. It has cast him as a virulent racist even though he once had a black business partner, mentored African-American kids, lived in a neighborhood about 20 percent black, and participated in complaints about a white police lieutenant’s son getting away with beating a homeless black man.

This narrative has perpetuated the lie that Zimmerman’s history of calls to the police indicates obsessive racial paranoia. Thus, discussing the verdict on the PBS NewsHour, University of Connecticut professor and New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb asserted that “Zimmerman had called the police 46 times in previous six years, only for African-Americans, only for African-American men.” Actually, prior to the call about Martin, only four of Zimmerman’s calls had to do with African-American men or teenage boys (and two of them were about individuals who Zimmerman thought matched the specific description of burglary suspects). Five involved complaints about whites, and one about two Hispanics and a white male; others were about such issues as a fire alarm going off, a reckless driver of unknown race, or an aggressive dog.

In this narrative, even Zimmerman’s concern for a black child—a 2011 call to report a young African-American boy walking unsupervised on a busy street, on which the police record notes, “compl[ainant] concerned for well-being”—has been twisted into crazed racism. Writing on the website of The New Republic, Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford describes Zimmerman as “an edgy basket case” who called 911 about “the suspicious activities of a seven year old black boy.” This slander turns up in other left-of-center sources, such as ThinkProgress.org.

Accounts of the incident itself have also been wrapped in false narrative—including such egregious distortions as NBC’s edited audio of Zimmerman’s 911 call which made him appear to say that Martin was “up to no good” because “he looks black.” (In fact, Zimmerman explained that Martin was “walking around and looking about” in the rain, and mentioned his race—of which he initially seemed unsure—only in response to the dispatcher’s question.)

While this falsehood was retracted and cost several NBC employees their jobs, other fake facts still circulate unchecked: most notably, that Zimmerman disobeyed police orders not to follow Martin (or even, as Cobb and another guest asserted on the NewsHour, not to get out of his car). In fact, there was no such order. The dispatcher asked if Zimmerman was following the teenager; Zimmerman said yes, the dispatcher said, “We don’t need you to do that,” and Zimmerman replied, “Okay.” (Just before this, the dispatcher had made comments that could be construed as asking him to watch Martin, such as, “Just let us know if he does anything else.”)

No one except Zimmerman knows whether he continued to track Martin—or, as he claims, headed back to his truck only to have Martin confront him. No one but Zimmerman knows who initiated physical violence. Both eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence, including injuries to Zimmerman’s face and the back of his head, supported his claim that he was being battered when he fired the gun. It was certainly enough to create reasonable doubt. Yet accounts that deplore the verdict often completely fail to mention Zimmerman’s injuries. Thus, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson says only that an unarmed “skinny boy” could not have been a serious threat to “a healthy adult man who outweighs him by 50 pounds”—nearly doubling the actual 27-pound difference between Martin and Zimmerman and omitting the fact that Martin was four inches taller.

The false narrative also makes it axiomatic that a black man in Zimmerman’s shoes wouldn’t stand a chance—especially if he had shot someone white. Never mind examples to the contrary, such as a 2009 case in Rochester, New York in which a black man, Roderick Scott, shot and killed an unarmed white teenager and was acquitted. Scott, who had caught 17-year-old Christopher Cervini and two other boys breaking into a car, said that the boy charged him and he feared for his life. (While the analogy has been decried as false in a number of Internet discussions because Scott actually saw Cervini doing something illegal, this is irrelevant to the self-defense claim: stealing from a car does not call for execution.)

What about general patterns? In the New Republic article, Ford cites a report in the Tampa Bay Times showing that “stand your ground” self-defense claims in Florida are more successful for defendants who kill a black person (73 percent face no penalty, compared to 59 percent of those who kill a white person). But he leaves out a salient detail: since most homicides involve people of the same race, this also means more black defendants go free. Nor does he mention that another article based on the same study of “stand your ground” cases from 2005 to 2010 noted “no obvious bias” in the treatment of black defendants—or mixed-race homicides: “Four of the five blacks who killed a white went free; five of the six whites who killed a black went free.”

One Florida case has been widely cited as a contrast to the Zimmerman verdict and a shocking injustice: the case of Marissa Alexander, a black woman said to be serving twenty years in prison for a warning shot to scare off her violent estranged husband. But that’s not quite what happened. Alexander’s “stand your ground” claim was rejected because, after the altercation with ex-husband Rico Gray, she went to the garage, returned with a gun and fired a shot that Gray said narrowly missed his head (a claim backed by forensics). There is plenty of evidence that Gray was abusive, but Alexander was not the complete innocent her champions make her out to be: she also assaulted Gray, giving him a black eye, while out on bail for the shooting and under court orders to stay away from him. Her twenty-year sentence, required by a mandatory minimum for firearm offenses, was a travesty; her conviction was not.

Liberals and disenchanted conservatives who decry fact-free ideological narratives, true-believer hysteria and willful reality-denial on the right should take a good look at the left’s Zimmerman Derangement Syndrome.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Cause for REAL outrage

This story has circulated widely on conservative blogs, mostly prior to the exoneration of George Zimmerman.  It seemed worthwhile to look at the story again in the light of that exoneration.



        You won't recognize me. My name was Antonio West and I was the 13-month old child who was shot in the face at point blank range by two Black teens who were attempting to rob my mommy -- who was also shot. She didn't have any money, so they shot us both.

        Too bad I was given a death sentence -- shot right in my face  because my white mommy didn't have any money with her.

        My family made the mistake of being white in a 73% non-white neighborhood, but my murder was not ruled a Hate Crime. Nor did President Obama take so much as a single moment to acknowledge my murder.

        I am one of the youngest murder victims in our great Nation's history, but the media doesn't care to cover the story.  President Obama has no children who could possibly look like me -- so he doesn't care.  And CNN & NBC don't care because my story is not interesting enough to bring them ratings.  Neither Al Sharpton nor Jesse Jackson visited my family or promised to get justice for me.  I don't understand why.  Maybe if I had been allowed to grow older, I might have understood some day.

        There is not a white equivalent of Al Sharpton because if there was he would be declared racist, so there is no one rushing to Brunswick GA to demand justice for me. There is no White Panther party to put a bounty on the lives of those who murdered me. I have no voice, I have no representation, and unlike those who shot me in the face while I sat innocently in my stroller - I no longer have my life.

        So while you are seeking justice for Treyvon, please remember to seek justice for me too. Tell your friends about me, tell you families, get tee shirts with my face on them and make the world pay attention, just like you did for Treyvon.
       
Excerpt from Jon Jay, who offers a comprehensive coverage of the issues this raises, including the various Leftist attempts to wriggle out of the implications.

The perpetrator


17 year old De’Marquis Elkins  who shot and killed Antonio West the 13 month old baby who was sitting his  stroller

Elkins shot the infant in the face after the mother refused to give him money. He also shot the mother in the leg and the neck.

He did not use an assault rifle. He did not get his stolen pistol from a gun show.  He was never instructed in gun safety from his father, grandfather, the NRA or anyone with any sense of responsibility

His favorite music is rap, He did not attend Christian school, nor was he home schooled. He did attend multicultural public education

His Momma was on welfare, got food stamps, and lived in public housing. His daddy was not around, and his two brothers have a different daddy.

He already has a record for violent crimes. He is gang member.

His mom, grandma, and Aunty all voted for Obama.

His public education and family taught him that the white man owes him something.

He went to collect it.

He has no plans on getting married, but does have a Baby Momma, and no, he is not supporting her baby.

He smokes dope. He does respect Kayne West.

While he has no job, nor is looking for one, he is well fed. He has no skills outside of crime. He speaks Ebonics, and is not capable of doing a professional interview, even though he spent 11 years in our public education system.

He is one of millions.

SOURCE

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More evidence that there is a vacuum between the ears of most Hollywood celebrities

According to a tweet sent Wednesday by singer Bette Midler, Republicans did everything they could to ensure the Allies lost to Adolf Hitler in World War Two, Twitchy reported.

"@GOP treats Mr. Obama the way they treated FDR in WWII. They did everything they could to ensure an Allied loss," she tweeted to her more than 449,000 followers.

A post at Twitchy called her tweet "ridiculous" and reminded readers that a very prominent Republican by the name of Dwight David Eisenhower not only led the Allied effort to defeat Hitler, he went on to become president.

History shows that the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana, voted against declaring war in 1941, but she was the only member of Congress to do so. It was not the first time she opposed U.S. military action, having voted to keep American troops out of World War One.

Twitchy said Midler simply used the argument adopted by liberals that anyone who opposes Obama on anything is guilty of treason against the United States.

"Midler doesn’t seem to apply that same 'logic' when a Republican is president, however," Twitchy said.

Twitter users took Midler to task for her tweet.

"You should explain that to all the dead Republicans buried at Arlington National Cemetery," one person tweeted.

"Lets be real here," another person tweeted, "Midler knows as much about history as she knows about meteorology, not much, nothing."

SOURCE

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Obamacaare Fee: $3; Cost of Paying: $100

Like a lot of conservatives, I have plenty of doubts about the president’s massive health care overhaul that’s going to change the way Americans get health coverage come Jan. 1, 2014. I think the plan is too big, too expensive, too cumbersome, too reliant on subsidies and imposes too may regulations. Although I support some of its goals, I would have surely voted against it were I a member of Congress.

Many on the political left — including a lot of thoughtful people whose opinions I respect — like the plan a lot more than I do. But I’ve just discovered a feature I think even they would agree is utterly futile.

Among the provisions that thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of small businesses are soon going to have to comply with is one that requires filling out a hugely complex form and paying an accountant to review and file it. In the case of the R Street Institute, we will be paying our accountant $53 to file this form. That may not sound like much but, aye, here’s the rub:

Our fee came to just $3.

You read that right. We will be spending, when you figure in staff time, at least $100 to comply with a bureaucratic mandate, just so the government can collect a $3 fee. Even our accountant was dumbstruck; you can read his take here.

This so-called “Patient-Centered Outcomes Trust Fund Fee” is imposed on health insurance plans and employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangements. R Street offers HRA as an employee benefit, which allows us to reduce our base health insurance premium by opting for a higher deductible plan without disadvantaging employees with higher health care costs. As an employer, we cover the entire premium, and fund the full $1,000 in HRA benefits ourselves.

If the Patient-Centered Outcomes Trust Fund is to exist at all, taxes on health insurers and big health plans might well be a good way to fund it. But a form that costs $100 to fill out so that the government can collect $3 in revenue is simply pointless by any standard. Furthermore, since few people seem to know about the rule (final guidance just came out) one imagines a great many small businesses are probably going to be in breach come July 31st.

There’s both a Regulatory Flexibility Act and a Small Business Administration Office of Advocacyspecifically intended to prevent the government from imposing requirements this stupid. Right now, they seem to be asleep at the switch.

This has got to change.

SOURCE

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More Anti-Capitalist Hypocrisy from the Left

Liberals want to force Goldman Sachs out of warehouse business

A Democratic Senator from Ohio, Sherrod Brown, plans a hearing Tuesday and wants the Federal Reserve to get banks out of the warehouse business. The New York Times previewed the hearing with a 3,600-word article that ran at the top of its Sunday front page and that blamed Goldman for costing American consumers more than $5 billion over three years in higher costs for canned soda, beer, and other products.

The Times followed up with a series of staff Twitter posts telling readers what to think about the news: “Don’t miss: damning story on how Goldman Sachs manipulates aluminum market….This story will fuel notion that Goldman is a ‘giant vampire squid.’”

There you have left-wing hypocrisy in a nutshell. When a government official like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tries to reduce the public consumption of sugary beverages with a tax that makes the drinks more expensive, he’s a public health hero. But when it’s a profit-generating company that stands accused of increasing beverage costs, it’s a greedy manipulative Wall Street blood-sucker.

In Goldman’s case, it’s not even clear that the firm has increased the price of beverages or of other aluminum products. In February 2010, when Goldman announced it was buying the metal warehouse Metro International Trade Services, a metric ton of aluminum cost about $2,053. Last month, it cost about $1,815.

And if Goldman were increasing the cost of aluminum cans, it’s not clear that the practices are in any way related to its status as a bank. Some non-bank firm could also buy an aluminum warehouse and try to jack up rent to customers.

The best way to deal with the problem of aluminum can prices — if that is a problem at all — is not for the government to decide who can or can’t buy an aluminum warehouse. It’s allowing the market to address the issue, either through new entrants — competition — or vertical integration.

Slate’s Matthew Yglesias noted the Times article failed to explain why someone else doesn’t just open up an aluminum warehouse that moves faster than the one Goldman runs, or charges lower rent. It’s not like the warehouse business has such high barriers to entry or is so capital intensive that no one else can compete.

Another possibility is that the aluminum end-users, such as the beverage or aluminum foil companies or Boeing, can own and operate their own warehouses. If they think they can do it cheaper or better than Goldman, nothing is stopping them from trying.

For the Federal Reserve, or Congress, to tell banks they can’t be in the warehouse business, though, is a risky proposition. The flip side of it is the regulators telling the bankers that they can only invest in certain government-approved things, such as bonds that are AAA rated by a nationally recognized rating agency, or mortgage debt backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. And we all know how that ended up.

Sure, if bank deposits are going to be backed by Federal Deposit Insurance or the institutions themselves are going to be subsidized or backstopped by the taxpayers, then there needs to be some oversight of how the banks invest capital. But there what regulators need to be watchful for is bank investments that lose too much money, not investments that make too much money, as the Goldman aluminum warehouse is accused of doing.

The best public policy outcome would be to take a hard look at the subsidies and the taxpayer backstops, so that a bank owning an aluminum warehouse wouldn’t be any different from any other company owning one.

SOURCE

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Chicago’s Struggles Reflected In Big Moody’s Credit Downgrade

First the Motor City, then the Windy City.

In the same week the City of Detroit made national headlines by filing the largest municipal bankruptcy in national history, the City of Chicago made smaller headlines when Moody’s Investors Service announced it had hit the city with a nearly unprecedented triple-downgrade of its credit rating on general obligation bonds.

Chicago now has a credit rating four notches below New York and Los Angeles and below other large cities in the Midwest, including Milwaukee and Cleveland.

In a statement, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said, “This confirms what I have been saying for more than a year. Without comprehensive pension relief from Springfield, municipalities such as Chicago will continue to receive negative reviews from rating agencies.” Emanuel became mayor in 2011, following the 22-year reign of Richard M. Daley.

Higher Debt Service Costs

The three-notch downgrade – with a negative outlook – does not bode well for Chicago’s bond investors, residents, or taxpayers. The city’s debt is estimated at $8.2 billion, and the big drop in its credit rating means its costs of repaying the debt and issuing debt in the future are sure to go up.

“The downgrade of the [general obligation bond] rating reflects Chicago's very large and growing pension liabilities and accelerating budget pressures associated with those liabilities,” Moody’s wrote in announcing the downgrade. “The city's budgetary flexibility is already burdened by high fixed costs, including unrelenting public safety demands and significant debt service payments. “

Those fixed costs could soon eat up half of Chicago’s operating budget, according to Moody’s, forcing the city to reduce services or raise taxes to maintain current service levels.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Facing Facts about Race

Young black males are at greater risk from their peers than from the police or white civilians

By  Victor Davis Hanson

Last week President Obama weighed in again on the Trayvon Martin episode. Sadly, most of what he said was wrong, both literally and ethically.

Pace the president, the Zimmerman case was not about Stand Your Ground laws. It was not a white-on-black episode. The shooting involved a Latino of mixed heritage in a violent altercation with a black youth.

Is it ethical for the president to weigh in on a civil-rights case apparently being examined by his own Justice Department? The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. If that were not true, they might well be given no more attention as supposed suspects than is accorded to white, Asian, or Latino youths. Had George Zimmerman been black, he would have been, statistically at least, more likely to have shot Trayvon Martin — and statistically likewise less likely to have been tried.

Barack Obama knows that if non-African-Americans were to cease all inordinate scrutiny of young African-American males, the latters’ inordinate crime rates would probably not be affected — given other causation for disproportionate incidences of criminality. Yet should their statistical crime profiles suddenly resemble those of other racial and ethnic groups, the so-called profiling would likely cease.

The president, I think, spoke out for three reasons: 1) He is an unbound,  lame-duck president, with a ruined agenda, facing mounting ethical scandals; from now on, he will say things more consonant with being a community organizer than with being a nation’s president; 2) he knows the federal civil-rights case has little merit and cannot be pursued, and thus wanted to shore up his bona fides with an aggrieved black community; and 3) as with the ginned-up “assault-weapons ban” and the claim that Republicans are waging a “war on women,” Obama knows, as a community activist, that tension can mask culpability — in his case, the utter failure to address soaring unemployment in the inner city, epidemic black murder rates, the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the ways his failed economic policies disproportionately affect inner-city youth.

Attorney General Eric Holder earlier gave an address to the NAACP on the Zimmerman trial. His oration was likewise not aimed at binding wounds. Apparently he wanted to remind his anguished audience that because of the acquittal of Zimmerman, there still is not racial justice in America.

Holder noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him. The sermon was about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males. Apparently, Holder believes that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Yet I fear that for every lecture of the sort that Holder is forced to give his son, millions of non-African-Americans are offering their own versions of ensuring safety to their progeny.

In my case, the sermon — aside from constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race — was very precise.

First, let me say that my father was a lifelong Democrat. He had helped to establish a local junior college aimed at providing vocational education for at-risk minorities, and as a hands-on administrator he found himself on some occasions in a physical altercation with a disaffected student. In middle age, he and my mother once were parking their car on a visit to San Francisco when they were suddenly surrounded by several African-American teens. When confronted with their demands, he offered to give the thieves all his cash if they would leave him and my mother alone. Thankfully they took his cash and left.

I think that experience — and others — is why he once advised me, “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young — or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males.  In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.

It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment — while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle — while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.

Holder, of course, knows that there are two narratives about race in America, and increasingly they have nothing to do with each other. In one, African-Americans understandably cite racism and its baleful legacy to explain vast present-day disparities in income, education, and rates of criminality. Others often counter by instead emphasizing the wages of an inner-city culture of single-parent families and government dependence, and the glorification of violence in the popular media.

In the old days of the Great Society, we once dreamed of splitting the difference — the government would invest more in the inner city, while black leadership in turn would emphasize more self-help and self-critique.

Not now. Both sides have almost given up on persuading the other. Eric Holder’s speech to the NAACP might as well have been given on Mars. It will convince zero Americans that stereotyping of young African-American males and Stand Your Ground laws are the two key racial problems facing America.

Again, Holder may offer his 15-year-old son the same warning that his father gave him about the dangers of racist, stereotyping police. Yet I suspect — and statistics would again support such supposition — that Holder privately is more worried that his son is in greater danger of being attacked by other black youths than by either the police or a nation of white-Hispanic George Zimmermans on the loose.

Besides, two developments over recent decades have made Holder’s reactionary argument about black/white relations mostly irrelevant. First, America is now a multiracial nation. The divide is not white versus black. And as the Zimmerman trial reminds us, it is no longer a nation where most of the authority figures are white males. We saw a female judge, a female jury, and an Hispanic in confrontation with an African-American; today those of various racial pedigrees and different genders interact in ways that transcend the supposed culpability of white males.

Second, the attitude of the so-called white community toward racial challenges is not so much political as class driven. White liberals have largely won the argument that massive government expenditure must be infused into the black community. Yet they have probably lost the argument that such vast government investments have done much to alleviate the plight of urban black youth.

Stranger still, there is no evidence in our increasingly self-segregated society that white liberals stand out as integrationists. The latter increasingly have the capital to school their children far from the inner city, to live largely apart from inner-city blacks, and in general to avoid the black underclass in the concrete as much as they profess liberal nostrums for it in the abstract.

No one seems to care that the children of our liberal elite, black and white, go to places like Sidwell Friends rather than to Washington public schools, where the consequences of 50 years of liberal social policy are all too real. If Chris Matthews wishes to apologize collectively for whites, then he should have long ago moved to an integrated neighborhood, put his children in integrated schools, and walked to work through a black neighborhood to get to know local residents. Anything else, and his apology remains what it is: cheap psychological recompense for his own elite apartheid.

Just as Eric Holder preferred anecdote to statistics, so too I end with an unscientific vignette of my own. Last week I was driving in northern California with the attorney general’s speech playing on the car radio. North of San Francisco I stopped to buy coffee and two local newspapers.

In one, there was a gruesome story of a young African-American male charged with ransacking a San Francisco jewelry store and murdering two employees, Khin Min, 35, of San Francisco, and Lina Lim, 51, of Daly City. The owner of the shop, Vic Hung, fought back and survived, despite receiving gunshot and stab wounds in the attack.

The suspected attacker had a prior record of violent assault. The victims were all of Asian ancestry. I don’t think their families would agree with Eric Holder that self-defense laws were the cause of such interracial violence. Nor would the six policemen who were fired upon by the suspect agree that stereotyping prompted this sort of mayhem.

Barack Obama will never suggest that the suspected killer physically resembles himself some three decades ago — and there would be no point in doing so. Nor will he admit that if Barack Obama owned an urban jewelry store and needed its profits to send his daughters to Sidwell Friends, he too might have become apprehensive when a young black male entered his store.

In the other paper, there was a strangely similar tale. Not far away, in Santa Rosa, at about the same time, two African-American youths in hoodies attacked another jewelry store, also had a shoot-out with the owner, and also failed to evade the police — though in this case none of the employees or customers was injured.

In such cases, too many Americans find there is a sort of tired sameness. The victims were white or Asian. The murder and robbery suspects were young African-American males. The violence was aimed not at acquiring food or clothing, but at stealing luxury goods. The armed small-business owners tried to defend themselves by firing back at their attackers. Had they been unarmed, both would have probably perished. In one case, the police were fired upon. The suspects had prior arrests.

And on and on and on across America each day, this same tragedy is played out of a small percentage of Americans committing violent crimes at rates far exceeding their proportion of the general population.

The world will long remember Trayvon Martin, but few people — and certainly not Barack Obama or Eric Holder, who have a bad habit, in an increasingly multiracial country, of claiming solidarity on the basis of race — will care that Khin Min and Lina Lim were torn to pieces by bullets and a knife. Few will care that they died in a vicious assault that had nothing to do with stereotyping, Stand Your Ground self-defense, weak gun laws, insufficient federal civil-rights legislation, or any of the other causes of interracial violence falsely advanced by the attorney general — but quite a lot to do with an urban culture that for unspoken reasons has spawned an epidemic of disproportionate violent crime on the part of young African-American males.

I offer one final surreal footnote to this strange juxtaposition of reading the real news while listening to the mytho-history that a Eric Holder constructed from the death of Trayvon Martin to indict both the police and the public.

What were the names of two of the men suspected of being the ones who last week shot it out with the Santa Rosa jeweler as Eric Holder demagogued the Trayvon Martin shooting?

Traveon Banks-Austin and Alexander Tyvon Brandon.

And so the tragedy continues.

SOURCE

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Barack Obama, Trayvon Martin and the Four Dirty Little Secrets of Black America

The reality about blacks offends Leftists (or they pretend it does) but it remains reality -- JR

By Nicholas Stix

Thousands gathered Saturday at rallies in more than 100 cities nationwide to remember Trayvon Martin, to press for federal civil rights charges against the man who shot him, and to attack stand-your-ground self-defense laws.  (by John Bacon, July 20 2013)
The Leftist-Main Stream Media Complex took a little time to get going, maybe because they really believed their own propaganda and were stunned by George Zimmerman’s acquittal, but the Community-Organizer-In-Chief’s disingenuous speech Friday has spurred things along—just like his helpful reminder that Martin would have looked like a little Obama Jr. as last year’s hysteria was being orchestrated.

I watched the Martin/ Zimmerman trial carefully. And—unlike many  readers and, let it be noted, all MSM Bigfoots—I have lived all my life surrounded by “diversity” in New York’s outer boroughs. My thoughts:

I. Blacks Don’t Mean What They Say

On Friday, the race-man-in-chief led another “dialogue” on his favorite subject: Whites are racists.

For generations, it’s always been the same “conversation”: blacks lecture, hector, and demand that whites agree that 2 + 2 = 5.

In 2008, after Barack Obama was exposed as an adherent of genocidal Black Liberation Theology, he notoriously threw his octogenarian white maternal grandmother under the bus by saying that she had “once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street.” (Actually, she was just worried about a specific suspicious black man on her way to work.) [Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race, NPR, March 18, 2008.]

In Friday’s monologue, Obama talked of, how prior to his political career, white women would see him approaching, and clutch their purses and lock their car doors; of his sponsorship as a state senator of an Illinois law prohibiting “racial profiling”; and of his desire to have all “Stand Your Ground” laws repealed, even though SYG was irrelevant to this case. [President Obama’s remarks on Trayvon Martin (full transcript), Washington Post, July 19, 2013.]

But blacks, even black nationalists like actor-director Mario Van Peebles who celebrate murderous black men, clutch their purses and lock their car doors at the sight of even harmless black men. Indeed, Obama himself has confessed to doing this.

And there’s a simple reason: A white who doesn’t take such precautions, as do prudent blacks, is a white who is going to be harmed or murdered. Every single day in America, blacks murder whites, often in horrific fashion.

Laws banning “racial profiling” have but one purpose: Aiding and abetting black criminals. Ditto for repealing Stand Your Ground laws, which have disproportionately helped blacks.

I will stipulate: even now, I have found one righteous black man: The Zimmerman Case Exposes Black Racism by Kevin Jackson, (The Black Sphere with Kevin Jackson, July 11, 2013.)

And time was, I really cared about conversing with blacks. But that was back when I was my teens and early twenties and considered myself a liberal.

Thus circa 1980 at a political meeting at my undergraduate alma mater, SUNY Stony Brook, my tall, sassy, gorgeous, black classmate, Dahlia Castillo got up to demand more privileges for black students. I stood up and shouted at her that blacks already received more financial aid than whites with the identical income. She yelled back: “Lemme talk to this little Jew!”

We continued arguing one-on-one. (Her Spanish name notwithstanding, Dahlia looked and sounded black, but not “ghetto.”)

But today, if you’re white—or “white enough”—you can’t talk with most blacks about the weather.

 One day in 1998, I spent my bus ride home from work conversing with a middle-aged black woman who taught Special Ed in (black) Far Rockaway, where I had recently lived.

When we reached my Queens neighborhood, she started explaining it to me with great self-assurance, saying it was full of military families who served at the local army base. I wasn’t aware of any military base, but I’d only been living there for a year and change, and maybe she knew something I didn’t.

Soon enough, I determined that there were no military families, and no base.

A few years later, on the same bus, the black driver started talking about the “military base.” I couldn’t take it anymore and told him there wasn’t any base. “It’s a secret,” came his response.

You see, in addition to being experts on race, black folks know all of these secrets that are unknown to whites.

If whites were in charge, this black hypocrisy and irrationality would not be a major problem. But under Jim Snow, blacks and white racial socialists are running things. And so, we get these Orwellian “2 + 2 = 5” lectures every time we turn on the TV, go to work, ride the bus, or go to school.

And if you even look like you’re about to invoke the number four, you get fired from your job, assaulted, your life destroyed, and maybe jailed.

II. Black Society’s Problems Go Much Deeper than Illegitimacy

The standard racial fairy tale promoted by blacks and their white Leftist allies: blacks’ only problem is white racism.

The standard racial fairy tale among white conservatives: blacks’ problems derive from fatherless homes.

If only.

Thus many right-of-center Internet commenters saw Trayvon Martin and prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel as personifying the illegitimacy, illiteracy, and crime of the black underclass.

Notwithstanding her thuggish demeanor, I don’t know about Jeantel. But Martin was not from the underclass. He was born to married parents. During most of his childhood (i.e., after they split up), both of them worked for a living.

The problem that Martin illustrates: black dysfunction and criminality are not limited to the underclass. (Indeed, the New Century Foundation report The Color of Crime debunked the racial fairy tale that poverty causes crime back in 2005.)

III. The “Respectable” Black Lady Problem

Anytime a white has trouble with blacks today, a “respectable” black lady cannot be far away, supporting the thuggery.

In 1987, I was temping as muscle hefting boxes of books for an educational publisher in lower Manhattan. Someone told me of a rumor claiming I had stolen money from a woman employee’s purse. I confronted the white boss lady, who apologized and confessed that the thief was a black boy who had gotten his job via his aunt—the black head secretary.

But to my knowledge, nothing happened to the thief or his aunt.

In 1994, while I was riding the A train home to black Far Rockaway at 9:30 p.m., a couple of black street urchins about eight years of age sat down next to me and whistled loudly, to make it impossible to read. When I walked away, they followed me to the first car. When I told them to beat it, the whole (black) car started threatening to kill me.

A black woman of about 40 told the boys, “They don’t like when you do something good.” (“Something good” = harassing whites.) I called her a racist, to which she responded, “I’m racist, and I’m proud!”

In May 2010, while shopping in a local Waldbaum’s with my 10-year-old son, I was jumped by a 20-year-old, 220-pound black female from whom I was walking away, who had gone there with her toddler, a girlfriend, and the girlfriend’s child solely for that purpose. (They blocked an aisle with bodies and empty shopping carts, and didn’t even pretend to be shopping.)

Immediately, two “respectable” middle-aged black ladies popped up to lie to the police, saying I had rammed the attacker’s shopping cart. Since I was the one with the bloody scratches, the cops arrested both of us. (All charges were later dropped).

In 2011, I was on a bus with a majority of whites coming home from shopping in Brooklyn, when a black man of about 20 decided to start blasting his radio. I asked him to turn it down. He played dumb, but wised up when a huge off-duty Irish cop bent over him to tell him to turn it off. However, a “respectable” black lady of about 60 sitting opposite him consoled him—as if he had been victimized.

The ultimate “respectable” black lady: 87-year-old Adelaide Sanford, for many years a New York school principal. After she retired, liberal politicians named her to powerful jobs on the New York City Board of Education and the State Board of Regents.

Sanford speaks with pedantic over-enunciation, but she has long embraced black racial violence. Her closest political ally was black supremacist extortionist, kidnapper, and murderer Sonny Carson (1935?-2002). In the early 2000s on the late Gil Noble’s Afrocentric ABC show, Like It is, Sanford condemned the placement of police and metal detectors in city schools as “militarization”—targeting “our most gifted young people,” i.e. weapons-toting teenage thugs.

As Jim Sleeper chronicled in The Closest of Strangers, Sanford systematically ran white teachers out of her school. Sleeper reported she had thousands of booklets printed up and distributed in city schools, at white taxpayers’ expense, claiming that blacks’ “learning styles”  were morally superior to whites.[See Educators Call Regents' Booklet Racist, By Mark A. Uhlig, NYT, October 02, 1987]

IV. The Black Sympathy Deficit: Blacks Don’t Actually Care About Black Children

The Trayvonistas claim to care about “the child.” But they’re all lying. The community doesn’t care about black kids, or they’d be demanding that authorities dismantle all of the street gang and disarm the thugs who are shooting up black areas and killing black kids. They would be demanding that black parents raise their children to forswear crime, since the failure of black parents to do their job is the cause of the bloodshed. (Did you notice Obama urging that on Friday?)

Stop teaching black kids to violate people, based on the color of their skin, and stop teaching them to violate the law because it’s just “the white man’s law.” It’s that simple.

If Trayvonistas who live in black communities cared about black kids, they would be dropping a dime on the bad guys, instead of saying, “Don’t snitch!” But they apparently have no problem with black kids getting murdered, as long as the murderers are also black. They just blame it all on the Man.

Had those blacks on my A train back in 1994 cared about black kids, they would have demanded the street urchins’ names, and either taken them home, or called child welfare on their parents for child neglect.

Instead, they encouraged them to become racist criminals.

You want to know who cares about black kids? White and “white-enough” people—like George Zimmerman, Obama voter!

My conclusion: America is in a deeper hole than even we know.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Possible hiatus

I seem to be having some delayed after-effects of some recent medical treatment so my blogging might be a bit erratic for the next few days

The usual Left-driven hypocrisy



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The Sharing Economy

by Don Boudreaux

One of the political left’s most popular (the most popular?) trope is to complain that free markets promote and exacerbate economic “inequality” (where “inequality” is used as a synonym for “observed differences across people – or statistical categories of people – in some variable, usually pecuniary income or wealth, that we presume to be especially important”).

But what are too often overlooked are the many ways that markets spread economic benefits and costs and, in the process, promote greater economic equality than would otherwise exist.  The ways that markets promote this sharing of benefits or costs are numerous.  Here’s just one example: the real-world consequences of what economists identify as the “law of one price.”  This sharing works across geographic space and across time.

Space

Suppose you’re strolling down 5th Avenue in Manhattan on a beautiful Autumn day.  You notice as you cross 14th Street that Golden Delicious apples are selling for $3.00 a piece.  A few minutes later, when you reach Washington Square park, at the foot of 5th Avenue, you notice that Golden Delicious apples are selling there for $1.00 a piece.  Having nothing urgent to do that day, you buy several boxes of Golden Delicious apples in Washington Square park and then haul them up to 14th St. to sell them.  You buy low ($1.00) and sell high ($3.00).  Your buying low in Washington Square park will, of course, cause the price of Golden Delicious apples sold in Washington Square park to rise, and your selling those apples up at 14th St. will cause the price of Golden Delicious apples sold at 14th St. to fall.  You – and other apple arbitrageurs – will continue to haul apples from Washington Square park up to 14th St. until the price of apples in both places is pretty much the same (say, $2.00 per apple).  One price will reign in both places for Golden Delicious apples.

Your profit-seeking actions here enable people up at 14th St. to share in the relative good fortune of people down at Washington Square park – that relative good fortune being an initially higher supply of Golden Delicious apples at Washington Square (or, more generally, a lower marginal value of those apples at Washington Square than at 14th St.).  Or, looked at differently, your profit-seeking actions oblige people down at Washington Square park to shoulder some of the relative misfortune of people up at 14th St. – that relative misfortune being an initially lower supply of Golden Delicious apples at 14th St. (or, more generally, a higher marginal value of those apples at 14th St. than at Washington Square).

Your profit-seeking actions moved a valuable good from where it was relatively more abundant to where it was relatively less abundant, causing the relative abundance of Golden Delicious apples at both sites to be pretty much equal to each other.

(If you doubt the veracity of my hypothetical, imagine how surprised you would be if, in fact, you saw interchangeable apples selling for one price at some location and, at pretty much the same time, selling for a very different price at a nearby location.  The very fact that such price differences aren’t common attests to the validity of the law of one price.)

Now suppose that before any of this arbitrage takes place, a neighborhood association up at 14th St., upon hearing rumors that Golden Delicious apples sell at Washington Square park for a mere $1.00 a piece, enacts and enforces legislation to force the price of those apples at 14th St. down to $1.00 each.  What’s the consequence?  Answer: no one down at Washington Square bothers to haul apples from Washington Square up to 14th St.  The (presumably well-intentioned) legislation prevents the market from performing its sharing function.  People down at Washington Square continue to enjoy apples at a price so low that it doesn’t reflect – as it otherwise would – the demands for apples of the folks up at 14th St.  The legislation meant to help the folks at 14th St. ends up benefitting the folks down at Washington Square by eliminating the incentives of arbitrageurs to haul apples from Washington Square up to 14th St.  And this legislation harms the people at 14th St. by artificially eliminating the incentives that would otherwise have driven arbitrageurs to haul apples from where they are relatively more abundant (Washington Square park) to where they are relatively less abundant (14th St.).

Time

The very same analysis holds over time.  When speculators buy today in the hopes of selling tomorrow at higher prices, these speculators move goods across time; goods are moved from a time when they are relatively more abundant to a time when they are relatively less abundant.  Successful speculation obliges people in times of relative abundance to share their good fortune with people existing in times of relatively less abundance.  Or, alternatively stated, successful speculation enables people in times of relatively less abundance to share in some of the good fortune of people existing in times of relatively great abundance.

And, of course, what’s true for ‘long’ speculation (buying today in hopes of selling at higher prices tomorrow) is true for ‘short’ speculation (selling today in hopes of buying tomorrow at lower prices).  ’Short’ speculators, if they are successful, move goods from tomorrow (when these goods are relatively more abundant) to today (when these goods are relatively less abundant).

Beautiful, isn’t’ it?!  (And no, I do not ask this rhetorical question facetiously.)

SOURCE

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Why are tax campaigners campaigning to make the poorest of the poor poorer?

Written by Tim Worstall in Britain

Most here will know that my favourite blood sport is hunting Richard Murphy and his buddies in the Tax Justice movement. But even I am appalled at the latest demand from them: that multinationals should be forced into paying more corporation tax in poor countries. They make this demand because they are willfully blind to the most basic point about corporation taxation: the incidence of said taxes. Here's what is said:

Corporate taxes are incredibly important to many developing countries. When many in their populations are too poor to pay any taxes and when corruption undermines much of the local tax base from commerce (and this fact has to be recognised at present) then the revenues to be earned from multinational companies form a significant part of the tax base of these states. In that case the base erosion that is now well documented due to transfer mispricing out of these countries on royalties, management services, interest, insurance and other charges levied on an intra-group basis, usually from tax haven subsidiaries within the same multinational entity, is of massive concern to these states and forms a major part of the illicit flows that prevent the provision of adequate services by many governments, undermining democracy and blighting many lives over succeeding generations.

We have argued for fundamental reform on behalf of these countries.

They're arguing that the poorest of the poor should be pushed further into poverty as a result of their determined ignorance about that tax incidence. We've known for well over a century now that companies do not actually bear the economic burden of taxes levied at the company level. It is either the workers, in the form of lower wages, or the investors, in the form of lower returns that do. This is not an arguable theoretical point: it's just a truth about this particular universe that we inhabit. No, don't worry about why for the moment, simply take it as being one of those truths.

We also know what it is that influences who carries the burden, workers or investors. The mobility of capital and the size of the economy of the taxing jurisdiction relative to the size of the world economy. The precise splits are argued about, volubly, but but all economists are agreed on those two basic points. It's some combination of the workers and shareholders and the smaller the economy and the more mobile capital the more it is the workers, the less the investors.

One more interesting point: Atkinson and Stiglitz, back in 1980 or so, showed that the burden could in fact be greater than 100%: the loss to workers and or shareholders could be greater than the sum raised in revenue. And yes, the smaller the economy and the more mobile capital the more likely this is and that this burden will be on the workers. So, what do we know about these developing economies where we are told that companies really must cough up more corporation tax in? In fact, that multinational companies must cough up more tax in? Quite: we know that these economies are very small compared to the world economy. That's why we call them developing economies: because they're small and poor ones.

Further, given that we are specifically talking about multinationals, the capital we're talking about must be perfectly mobile. It is outside investment going in: not domestic investment pondering whether to leave or not. If we piece all of this together then we get the ugly reality. The truth is that the burden of higher corporate tax on multinationals in these poor countries will be upon the backs of the workers. Those workers being, by our very definitions of poor and developing country, the poorest of the poor. These are the people we actually want to help and here the "Tax Justice" campaigners are insisting that their wages should be driven even lower. And as Joe Stiglitz has pointed out, their wages could be driven down by more than the actual revenue raised.

This is not, I would submit, a sensible way of improving people's incomes: imposing a tax which we know will reduce those incomes.

As above I usually take my pursuit of these people as a rather jolly blood sport. A day out with the hounds and if the odd vulpine gets harmed well, no matter and that's not really the point of it all: it's the jolly day out that is. But then we find them proposing something quite as barmy, even evil, as this. They simply will not listen to what they are being told about the incidence of corporate taxation. They just don't want to believe that it's not either the company or the evil capitalists who bear the burden of these taxes. As a result they ignore that their recommendations will grind the faces of the poor even more firmly into the dust. At which point the pursuit of their errors become less a jolly day out and more of a necessary duty.

If you want to raise wages in poor and small economies then you want more multinationals to invest in those poor and small economies. Trying to tax said multinationals more so that they invest less and thus depress wages just isn't a good method of raising living standards in these places. We want to tax less, not more.

SOURCE

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Cost-Cutting Board Ready to Veto Your Doctor

By Nat Hentoff

A major section of Obamacare that requires employers to provide health insurance for their employees or pay a fine has been postponed until 2015, resulting in much confusion and controversy around the nation. But little attention has been paid to the president’s most threatening weapon for cutting health care costs: the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It still remains, causing the administration fury when it’s called a “death panel.”

The IPAB is, according to the authors, “directed to ‘develop detailed and specific proposals related to the Medicare program,’ including proposals cutting Medicare spending below a statutorily prescribed level.”

For instance, as I’ve pointed out, whatever Medicare-paid prescriptions your physician has authorized for your benefit can be vetoed by the IPAB (whose members have never examined you) if they cost too much.

Meanwhile, this 15-member board, which can remove you from the universe, “will control more than a half-trillion dollars of federal spending annually.”

Rivkin and Foley continue: “Once the board acts, its decisions can be overruled only by Congress, and only through unprecedented and constitutionally dubious legislative procedures — featuring restricted debate, short deadlines for actions by congressional committees … and super-majoritarian voting requirements.”

In this United States of Obama, “The law allows Congress to kill the otherwise inextirpable board only by a three-fifths super majority, and only by a vote that takes place in 2017 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 15.”

If this board “fails to implement cuts, all of its powers are to be exercised by (Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen) Sebelius or her successor.”

I don’t remember voting for her or him.

Rivkin and Foley say with fearful logic: “At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.”

It sure does. What will members of Congress do about this next outrage by Obama? What will the 2016 presidential candidates say about it?

There’s more that needs special scrutiny. When I first heard of what follows — “Another ObamaCare Tax That Is Bad for Your Health” (Fred Burbank and Thomas J. Fogarty, The Wall Street Journal, July 8) — I was very disturbed. This cold-hearted Obama reduction of our health care possibilities took me back almost 20 years. I was 69 at the time, and my physician told me, “Your life is hanging by a thread. I must prepare you for open-heart bypass surgery.”

As described at about.com, during this procedure, the chest is opened with an incision that allows the surgeon access to the heart, which is temporarily stopped with a solution of potassium (“What Happens During Open Heart Surgery,” about.com).

“At this time,” the article continues, “the heart-lung machine does the work of the heart and the lungs.”

While I was getting ready for this very daunting surgery, my doctor and others told me how lucky I was because this particular open-heart procedure had only become possible some years before with newly researched techniques.

But now, under Obama, as physicians Burbank and Fogarty report in their op-ed for The Wall Street Journal: “On Jan. 1, manufacturers of medical devices in the U.S. were hit with a new 2.3 percent tax on revenue, one of the many sources of money tapped to pay for Obamacare …

“Its effect on U.S. medical-device startups— the small companies that fuel innovation — may prove devastating.”

Why? Burbank and Fogarty answer: “Coincident with the 2.3 percent tax, venture capital investment in medical devices has all but ceased. … Ask yourself two questions: Who would want to invest in a highly regulated, government-controlled industry that faces a unique tax? What startup medical device company can reach the magical break-even point with a (special) tax on its revenue?

“When combined with the ever-increasing time it takes to get approval from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Food and Drug Administration, this levy is bound to destroy startups and stunt medical-device innovation in the U.S. and thus the quality of health care worldwide.”

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Shawarma Republics are Burning

by DANIEL GREENFIELD

(A Shawarma is a Middle-Eastern sandwich comprised of different meats mixed together -- JR)

Syria is burning, not because of the Arab Spring or Tyranny or Twitter, or any of the other popular explanations. The fire in Syria is the same firestorm burning in Iraq, in Turkey, in Lebanon and throughout much of the Muslim world. It has nothing to do with human rights or democracy. There is no revolution here. Only the eternal civil war.

Most people accept countries with ancient names like Egypt, Jordan and Syria as a given. If they think about it at all they assume that they were always around, or were restored after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But actually the countries of the Middle East are mostly artificial creations borrowing a history that is not their own.

When Mohammed unleashed a fanatical round of conquests and crusades, he began by wrecking the cultures and religions of his native region. And his followers went on to do the same throughout the region and across the world.

Entire peoples lost their history, their past, their religion and their way of life. This cultural genocide was worst in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe. But the Middle Eastern peoples lost much of their heritage as well.

The Muslim conquerors made a special point of persecuting and exterminating the native beliefs and indigenous inhabitants they dominated. Israeli Jews, Assyrian Christians and Persian Zoroastrians faced special persecution.

Conquered peoples were expected to become Muslims. Those who resisted were repressed as Dhimmis. But those who submitted and became Muslims suffered a much worse fate, losing major portions of their traditions and history. They were expected to define themselves as Muslims first and look back to the great day when their conquerors subjugated them as the beginning of their history. Their pre-Islamic history faded into the mists of the ignorant past.

But Islam did not lead to a unified region, only to a prison of nations. The Caliphates, like the USSR, held sway over a divided empire through repression and force. Many of those peoples had lost a clear sense of themselves, but they still maintained differences that they expressed by modifying Islam to accommodate their existing beliefs and customs.

Islamic authorities viewed this as nothing short of heresy. It was against some such heresies that the Wahhabi movement was born. But these attempts to force the peoples of the region into one mold were doomed to fail.

Islam came about to stamp out all differences, to reduce all men to one, to blend state and mosque into one monstrous law for all. And it did succeed to some extent. Many cultures and beliefs were driven nearly to extinction. Jews, Christians and others struggled to survive in the walls of a hostile civilization. But Islam could not remain united and the divisions resurfaced in other ways.

Muslim armies did succeed in conquering much of the world in a frenzy of plunder and death. But they quickly turned on each other. Rather than conquering the world, they went on to fight over the plunder and the power. Nothing has really changed since then.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire brought in the Europeans to reconstruct the Middle East. The modern states are the work of their hands. A clumsy mismatch of borders and warring peoples. The USSR came after with its own line of coups and Arab Socialist dictatorships. Now the third wave of Islamist tyrannies is on the march. But none of them can solve the basic problems of the region.

Syria is burning not because of human rights, but because it's a collection of different peoples with different variants of Islam who don't get along. A handful are descended from the original natives. The rest are foreign Arab invaders, some more recent than others. The story repeats itself across the region. And across the world.

Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon are just some examples of countries permanently divided by such a mismatch of peoples. Agreements and elections come to nothing because no group believes that they will be treated as equals if they aren't in power. And they're right. Equality doesn't just come from open elections, but from a cultural acceptance of differences. This simply does not exist in the Muslim world where gender differences mean you're a force of corruption or a slave, ethnic differences mean you are the son of a dog, and religious differences mean you're an enemy.

Had the forces of Islam not turned the Middle East upside down, the nation state might have evolved out of individual cultures, rather than as a strange hybrid of feudalism and Great Powers colonialism. For all their bluster and viciousness, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon are abandoned colonies. The Gulf states are even worse, backward clans of cutthroat merchants who are parasitically feeding off the West, even as they try to destroy it.

The rulers invariably marry Western women or women with a large dose of Western blood. Sadat married the daughter of an English woman. Mubarak married the daughter of a Welsh woman. For all that the Hashemites tout their descent from Mohammed, Queen Noor is more Anglo-Saxon than Arab. And the current Jordanian King's mother was originally known as Toni Gardner. Even when they do marry Arab women, they are usually Christian Arabs and British educated.

There's something pathetic about the sight of the post-colonial Arab leadership trying to gain some psychological legitimacy by intermarrying with their former rulers. As if pumping enough English blood into the veins of their offspring will somehow make them as capable as the Empire that ruled them and then left to attend to its own affairs.

But not nearly as pathetic as half of them claiming descent from Mohammed. Both reveal the underlying historical instability of their rule. These aren't nation states, they're hopelessly dysfunctional geographical divisions bristling with Western weapons and money, with interpretations of the Koran and texts on Arab Socialism, where everyone is a philosopher and a scholar-- but no government lasts longer than it takes to overthrow it.

Every colonel and general dreams of empire, and every cleric in his flea ridden robes theorizes on the Islamic state, but none of them can do anything but act out the same murderous dramas. Building their house of cards and then watching it tumble down.

Had Western shenanigans not raised the price of bread, while providing support to local leftists from wealthy families, the Arab Spring would not exist. Now that it has, it's only another excuse for locals to fight their civil wars and then erect another ramshackle regime on the ruins of the old.

This isn't 1848 as some have theorized. It's 848, over and over again. Worse still, it's 748.

When you don't have a nation, but you do have an army, then what you have is not a state, but a Shawarma Republic. To keep the army from overthrowing the leader, he must find internal or external enemies. When a downturn occurs, and the mobs gather, either the army massacres the mob or overthrows the ruler. Or the rebels cut a deal with some internal elements and wipe out the loyalists.

This is an old regional narrative that has nothing to do with democracy, human rights, Twitter or any of the other nonsense flowing through New York Times columns faster than the sewers of Cairo.

The modern Shawarma Republic has some royal or military ruler at the top who receives money from the West or from its enemies to hold up his end of the bargain. Which to him means stowing the money into foreign bank accounts, sending his trophy wife on shopping trips to Paris and striking a fine balancing between wiping out his enemies and buying them off.

Naturally he carries on the ritualistic chant of "Death to Israel", and if Israel ever looks weak enough, or his new Chinese or Iranian allies kick in the money for a full fledged invasion, he may even take a whack at it. But mostly the chants of "Death to Israel" are a convenient way of executing his enemies for collaborating with Israel.

In Syria, Assad's Shawarma Republic (officially the Syrian Arab Republic, formerly the United Arab Republic, after a bunch of coups and one kingdom, the privately owned fiefdom of the dumbest scion of the clan) is on fire. Because the enemies of the regime, and some of its former allies, got around to exploiting Bashar Assad's weakness.

For now Assad's armies backed by his Iranian allies are in control of the Shawarma Republic of Syria but that might change. Especially now that Turkey and much of the Arab world have stepped into the anti-Assad camp. And when the fireworks die down, and the corpses are cleaned up off the streets, there will be another Shawarma Republic. This one may not be run by the Alawites. But it will be run by someone, and it won't be the people.

The irony is that after turning Lebanon into its puppet, Syria got the same treatment from Iran. And if a revolt succeeds, then it might get the same treatment from Turkey. The big dog bites the little dog, and the bigger dog bites it.

The process can't be stopped, because the Islamic conquests that wrecked the region, the Caliphates that tried to make it static, and the colonial mapmakers who turned it into a ridiculous puzzle of fake countries filled with people who hate each other-- make it impossible.

There was a brief window after the war when the exit of empires and the presence of a large Western educated class seemed as if they might lead to working societies. Instead they led to the pathetic imitations of the worst of the West, dress up generals and scholars cranking out monographs explaining how everything could be made right with their theory. Now it's leading back to Islamism and the bloody clashes in the desert that originated this permanent state of dysfunction.

The Islamic Caliphate as a panacea for the problems caused by Islamic caliphates is about as good an idea as pouring gasoline on a fire. Which is exactly what the Islamists financed by Gulf royals, who can't help cutting throats even when it's their own, are doing.

You can't build a country out of armies and billions of dollars. The reason that Israel works and the Arab world doesn't is very simple. The Jews retained their identity. The perpetrators and victims of Islam who surround them have no roots. Only the sword in their hand and the shifting sands under their feet.

SOURCE

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“Stand Your Ground” Critics Personify European Pacifism, Not American Values

The legal concept of standing one’s ground against deadly force has been a part of American culture since our founding as a nation; and has been an explicit component of our country’s law for more than 100 years. An individual’s right to possess a firearm to defend one’s self is guaranteed unequivocally in the Second Amendment to our Constitution. And, in the case known as Beard v. United States, the Supreme Court in 1895 ruled that a person facing a violent assault may repel that action by force, including deadly force, without first “retreating.”

This century-old legal precedent defined what now are commonly referred to as “Stand Your Ground” laws, which have been adopted by some 30 states. Those laws now are being targeted by anti-gun advocates such as President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as by some moderate Republican lawmakers, including Arizona Sen. John McCain. The catalyst for such criticism is the recent acquittal of George Zimmerman by a Florida jury, which found him not guilty in the shooting death last year of Trayvon Martin.

In fact, the Florida jury’s recent decision acquitting Zimmerman was based not on that state’s Stand Your Ground law, but on the even more basic common law principle of self-defense. Never pausing to allow facts to get in the way of excuses to push their gun-control agenda, however, Obama and Holder are leading the crusade to weaken or repeal state Stand Your Ground Laws based on the Zimmerman verdict.

Even if Zimmerman’s lawyers had invoked Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, it might not have cleared him of wrongdoing. The fact of the matter is – despite the effort to demonize such laws by the gun-control crowd – the statutes do not offer a blank check to “shoot first and ask questions later;” neither do they serve as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for those involved in contested shooting incidents. The Tampa Bay Times, for example, compiled a list of more than 200 shooting incidents across Florida involving the Stand Your Ground law. Of the 133 incidents in which the shootings were fatal, only 54 percent were deemed justified by the courts.

Yet, in a speech delivered to the NAACP mere days after the Zimmerman verdict, Holder slammed Stand Your Ground laws, saying they “senselessly expand the concept of self-defense.” He added that such laws undermine public safety by “allowing -- and perhaps encouraging -- violent situations to escalate in public.” Holder has also criticized Stand Your Ground supporters for “creating an issue where none existed,” which is, ironically, exactly what he is doing.

Obama, Holder, and other critics of Stand Your Ground laws are, in effect, adopting the notion that it is not the responsibility of the individual to defend himself or herself against attack, but rather the government’s duty to do so for them. In this worldview, the individual is supposed meekly to “back away” from a confrontation and let the State, through police intervention -- one supposes – take over. This is the European cultural view -- a philosophy very much at odds with that on which our nation was founded, and which served us well until recently, when the gun-control crowd began its push for cultural recognition.

We are a nation that was founded precisely on the notion of taking a stand and repelling aggressors who sought to take away what was rightfully ours. Ours was not a nation that retreated when the British sent their ships to our shores. We always have protected our homeland and defended it from harm. “The west was won,” not by retreating and backing away from confrontations with adverse forces, but rather by meeting and overcoming those challenges. It is the quintessential American way. And it is one reason America is the sole remaining world superpower and European nations are not.

This same principle is at work in Stand Your Ground laws across America; laws reflecting the reality that retreating when facing a violent assailant rarely, if ever, carries the day for the victim.

Moreover, Stand Your Ground laws remove the confusion over when, and how, citizens may legally defend themselves in situations of peril. It takes much of the “legal guesswork” out of situations where every second counts, and second-guessing could lead to extreme bodily harm, or even death.

Rather than weaken Americans’ right to self-defense, we should be strengthening such a fundamental right, and trust the courts to adjudicate and render justice when and where needed. Europeans may think otherwise -- as apparently do Obama, Holder, McCain and others here in America. However, most Americans would, I suspect, put their faith not in European pacifism, but in the understanding and resolve of the American people and our forbears.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Conservatives Should Point and Laugh as Detroit Dies

Detroit represents the epitome of the blue state, Democrat machine liberalism that Barack Obama represents. Well, not one damn cent for Barry’s Kids.

Liberal media mouthpieces like the New York Times are all in a tizzy because the consequences conservatives have been warning America about for years are finally arriving. “We have to step in and save Detroit,” it cries.  We don’t have to do any such thing.

Steven Rattner, writing in the Times, says “But apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs, and eventually Congress decided to help them.” And apart from the iceberg, the Titanic’s maiden voyage went swimmingly.

This is a problem created by the people of Detroit. It’s their problem to solve – without our money.

If you listen to the hand-wringers, you’ll never hear an honest examination of why Detroit is imploding. Nor do they offer any evidence that the half-wits who elected the quarter-wit Democrats governing them have learned anything at all from this trip to the precipice.

The most hilarious arguments are the ones where liberals whine about the middle class fleeing from the city, taking jobs and the tax base with them. Sure, regular folks took a look at the well-governed, stable, crime-free Utopia that was Detroit and thought, “Yeah, we need to get the hell out of here.”

Liberalism and the political, economic and social pathologies it spawned drove everyone out of Detroit who wasn’t feeding at the municipal trough, whether through some form of government job or some form of government handout.

This isn’t a chicken and the egg brainteaser. It’s simple cause and effect. Liberalism turned Detroit into a hideous dump that milked those who contribute to society to pay off the Democrat machine’s constituents who don’t. People didn’t feel like living in a pig sty while serving as piggy banks for corrupt Democrats. The productive decided that while the non-productive might win by voting at the ballot box, the productive would win by voting with their feet.

Yeah, Detroit had some hard knocks. The auto industry collapsed, which is not surprising since it was the blue state model in corporatist form. But every city takes hits. Dallas and Houston have been slammed again and again by the energy sector, and they keep coming back.

Not Detroit. It keeps milking the “GM went bye-bye” excuse, with its apologists never mentioning that GM didn’t just disappear. GM just went to places that didn’t suck.

What did Detroit do about it? Nothing. The auto industry started changing decades ago, but liberals act as if that change somehow excuses Detroit’s legacy of corruption and incompetence. Detroit’s most significant export in decades was Eminem. That’s reason enough to want to see a stake driven through its metaphorical heart.

But, of course it’s all the Republicans’ fault…for some reason. Rattner says, “If I thought it could pass Congress, I’d happily support a special appropriation, but the politics of any spending are toxic in Washington these days.” Yeah, it is toxic to suggest that those of us who didn’t vote in a succession of criminals to run our governments give our money to morons who did. And, in any sane universe, no one would ever suggest doing so.

But this is the Times, the voice of Big Liberalism. It opines that, “America is just as much about aiding those less fortunate as it is about personal responsibility.” Except, America isn’t about “aiding the less fortunate.” It’s about the “less fortunate” working to make themselves “more fortunate” – understanding that liberals think people become financially stable not through hard work but by dumb luck.

Not surprisingly, in a Times article referring to the miserable condition of a city run by a liberal Democrat machine for half a century, there is no mention of either liberalism or Democrats. That’s like writing about obesity and not mentioning food.

The liberal elite, which loves root causes, absolutely refuses to admit that the root cause of Detroit’s woes is liberalism itself.

SOURCE

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The US could learn from Britain's healthcare mistakes

After the sordid mud-wrestling session in the [House of] Commons last week (official title: statement on the Keogh report by the Health Secretary), could anyone still believe that politicians are the right people to be in charge of healthcare? As Jeremy Hunt and Andy Burnham traded accusations and self-serving denials of blame for the thousands of unnecessary (remember that word) deaths in 14 NHS [British government] hospitals, they almost clean forgot to offer expressions of remorse, regret or sympathy to the victims and their families.

For what it’s worth, Mr Burnham was rather worse than Mr Hunt, but that is by-the-by. This was about as low as party politics gets. Egged on by their screaming supporters behind them, the front bench spokesmen presented us with a very nearly perfect case for removing the care of the sick from government manipulation altogether.

An edited video of that squalid parliamentary occasion should be made available to every member of the Obama administration and every Democratic congressman who is desperate for the US federal government to take charge of healthcare. Lesson: this is what happens when political parties are directly responsible for the dispensation of medical treatment. If you have power over a system, then you are held responsible when it fails. If medical and administrative personnel know that they are accountable to government, they are liable to put the demands of politicians over the concerns of patients – even if they know those demands to be mistaken or absurd. Not that the White House plan (inevitably known – in spite of the President’s people insisting that it is the Affordable Care Act – as Obamacare) is as remotely monolithic as our own government-owned, government-run, government-funded system. That would be anathema to the political culture of the United States.

In fact, our two countries have precisely opposite phobias: in Britain, anything that is private (or worse, privatised) must be assumed to exist solely to produce Profit, which is axiomatically regarded as wicked. In the US, anything that is run by central government is seen as inherently threatening to personal liberty. So Obamacare had to square an impossible circle, and ended up with something like the worst of all worlds. In order to guarantee medical care for everyone in the country while avoiding universal government provision – which would be socialist in the true sense of the word – the plan makes it a legal requirement for everyone to buy private health insurance.

The original rule was that all companies with more than 50 employees would be required by law to provide them with health cover but that has gone out the window (sorry, been delayed) because the business community objected.

Unfortunately, the poor individual, not having quite the same clout in Washington as big companies, is still stuck. He will have to pay for a health insurance policy – whether he wants it, or thinks he needs it, or not – or be fined.

Now that would be a very strange sort of law in any free society, let alone one that is positively paranoid about personal liberty. Should a democratic government be able to make it legally necessary for you to buy a product you do not want to cover the cost of your potential needs? It is true that in most countries you are legally obliged to have certain kinds of third party cover – on car insurance, for example – but that is to provide for the protection of other members of society, not yourself. What the Obamacare law is designed to do is pull the young and fit compulsorily into the health insurance net so that, in actuarial terms, risks are spread more widely and the cost of premiums comes down. It is a matter of hot debate at the moment in Washington as to whether this will actually be the result. In the meantime, there is huge popular resistance to the compulsion involved and to the overweening political interference in what most Americans see as the highly personal relationship between doctor and patient.

But America’s stumbling healthcare programme is not alone in creating bizarre anomalies. The absolute terror in which politicians of all parties in Britain confront the impossible dilemma of funding the NHS has led us into a positive Wonderland of self-contradiction and absurdity. The Nuffield Trust estimates that there will be roughly a £50 billion deficit between funding and demand for healthcare by the end of the next parliament.

Every sane politician knows that the present arrangements are unsustainable: even if we managed to reform the standards of hospital care to prevent patients dying of starvation and thirst, there is no way that a fit-for-the-21st-century comprehensive medical system can be afforded solely out of taxation. But say this to a Tory minister (or one of his team) and he will start shrieking about electoral doom. As one very sensible Conservative said to me recently: “You can’t start charging for things that people now get for free. We’d lose the next election.”

Well no, that is not the way to introduce a mixed economy in healthcare: you don’t “start charging for things” willy-nilly. You just start allowing people to pay for things above and beyond their NHS care without penalising them. Which, of course, is what they do already every time they go to the chemist and buy aspirin for a headache – on which grounds nobody threatens to take away their right to NHS treatment for the headache.

But try that with a cancer drug that the NHS doesn’t believe is cost-effective and will not administer, and you will be accused of illicitly “topping up” your NHS care and possibly (as has actually happened) be denied further treatment for your illness. Our healthcare system is so monopolistic that it will not permit you to spend your own money (for fear of creating “two-tier” healthcare), while the proposed US system is determined to force you to spend your money on a product you don’t want. This is crazy.

Lessons: no country can afford modern health care without a mixed funding system of some kind. The more power politicians have over the running of that system, the more likely it is to get bogged down in partisan point-scoring. The more choice and responsibility reside with the patient and the clinician respectively (rather than with the bureaucrat and the government), the greater the chance that people will receive proper care. The more government tends to function as an exacting purchaser and regulator of services, rather than as a provider of them, the less likely it is to cover up or ignore the fact that thousands of people are dying unnecessarily on its watch.

Couldn’t we start treating voters like grown-ups, and talk sense about this?

SOURCE

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Lies, damn lies, and America’s astonishingly partisan, corrupt media

The disgracefully slanted coverage of the trial of George Zimmerman is only the latest, prominent example of liberal media bias. Since the 2012 presidential election, America’s national media hasn’t let up. It’s pushing harder on its pro-liberal Democrat and anti-conservative Republican slant.

Consider Obamacare.

In recent days, organized labor turned harshly and vocally against the so called “Affordable Care Act.” Three leaders of America’s largest unions, including Jimmy Hoffa, wrote a jaw-dropping letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Excerpts of their arguments sound like a Republican opposition brief:

“When you and the President sought oursupport for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat. Right now, unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

“We have been strong supporters of you. In campaign after campaign we have put boots on the ground, gone door-to-door to get out the vote, run phone banks and raised money to secure this vision. Now this vision has come back to haunt us.”

“Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem; you need to fix it. The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe. Perverse incentives are already creating nightmare scenarios.”

“The law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits”

“As you both know first-hand, our persuasive arguments have been disregarded and met with a stone wall by the White House and the pertinent agencies.”

“On behalf of the millions of working men and women we represent and the families they support, we can no longer stand silent in the face of elements of the Affordable Care Act that will destroy the very health and wellbeing of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans”

Days later, the Laborers International Union of North America (“International of North America? Gee, do they consider themselves American? But I digress) followed up with a letter to President Obama, warning of “the destructive consequences” of Obamacare if it weren’t drastically modified.

Scathing criticisms of the president’s signature achievement from bulwarks of the liberal Democratic establishment should register high on America’s political Richter scale. Instead, they’re practically tree-fall in an empty forest, because the corrupt broadcast networks aren’t reporting them. Consider if America’s biggest business leaders had delivered comparable blasts at the economic policies of Presidents Bush, Bush, or Reagan. The network amplifiers would have blown their fuses, prolongedly.

The deception reaches deep into new media, as well. This weekend, AOL News informed its millions of viewers that Republicans are “still attacking Obamacare.” Yes, Republicans like Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. The kids online don’t have a clue.

From Big Labor’s pains to the IRS’s depredations, the media con game shifts from silence to farce.   Congressional hearings last week revealed the scheme to target conservative groups was directed out of the Office of the IRS Chief Counsel. The Chief Counsel is one of only two agency employees who are appointed by Barack Obama! That bombshell might do more damage than all the explosions in “White House Down,” Hollywood’s flop valentine to Obama.

But it’s not the story from our leading talking heads, who, if they deigned to cover the story at all, either mocked Republicans’ clumsy questioning, or gave heroic, spotlight treatment to Ranking Member and Court-Distractor Elijah Cummings’ idiotic queries whether any witness had discovered a murder weapon with the president’s fingerprints on it, or something like that.

The script is universal and firm: Play stories that help Democrats hard, thoroughly, repeatedly. Stories that help Republicans, if they can’t be ignored, should be delivered quietly and, especially if they hurt the president, for no more than two news cycles at most.

Thus, a recent study by Obama’s own Justice Department concluding that gun control laws are ineffective in reducing gun violence likely will never cross the silky lips of Brian Williams.

An EPA study that failed to link fracking—hydraulic fracturing—with environmental contamination will not see the broadcast big screen.

Coverage of abortion must emphasize that pro-life is extreme and pro-choice is reasonable. You will never hear the network big-hairs try to pin down Democratic politicians on extreme positions or defying public opinion on things like late term abortion, partial birth abortion, parental consent, or many other vulnerabilities of the NARAL Democrats. It’s not in the script.

No, they’ll stalk and bait and quiz pro-life Republicans, eagerly hunting the next gaffe that can go big time.

The cynical, despicable thing about all this is that even though the public knows it’s being played by cosmopolitan liberals, the game still works. Average  Americans might not trust the media further than Barack Obama can throw a game-opening pitch, but the networks still set the agenda and control the subject.

Partisans of right and left seek their favored outlets. But the consciousness of the non-political middle is shaped by the legacy media, and the legacy media is a corrupt PR arm for the Democratic Party.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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A prince is born


The crowd outside Buckingham Palace

The birth of a healthy baby is always a time of happiness but the birth of a Royal baby has just sent much of Britan demented.  And that joy is felt in other countries where the Queen reigns too.  It is great news in Australia where  I live.  Americans usually seem not to understand at all what it is like to grow up in a monarchy. There are ancient tribal emotions involved.   It is very uplifting and a source of pride.  The secret is that the Royal family are seen as the splendid branch of OUR family.  We know them well and feel a connection to them.  Their glory is our glory. French "gloire" is a phantasm.  The glory of the Royal family is real.